I'm actually surprised that this is the case. I dont know if yum's slowness (as a by product of its implementation) is one of its shortcomings, but I always presumed that it was more sophisticated as a package manager. Especially, since it implements a SAT solver (libzypp) that is pretty nifty.

I have heard that it managed package dependencies (cyclic, broken packages, etc.) much better than aptitude.

I'm an Ubuntu user, so the above is pure speculation - but could someone answer whether the SAT solver causes the slowdown ?